In considering reselling and deciding what type of plans to offer customers, does anybody know the following (or know where I could find the following information):

1. What is the average size of a website?

2. What is the average bandwidth used by the average website?

Of course I realize that corporate mega-sites are a different story, but I'm talking about the "average joe personal or business site".

Thanks in advance for any insight...

I think you could probably find a lot of info on this doing a search here...

There isn't really an accurate "average" because there are people that put up a 2mb site with links to their favorite sites and have no visitors other than themselves, friends and family... then there are the people that put up 200mb files for all their college classmates to download or whatever.

To give you an idea however, a normal usage site I know of, the person uses up about 50mb of space, and around 1GB of traffic. This is a simle website that gets a lot of traffic.

Keep in mind that the space a person will need on their account is not just the amount of space their website takes up. They need room for their emails, and logs. Log files can become huge if they aren't managed properly, and usually the client will not know how to manage them. I had a high traffic website on a server that I had with log files taking up about 750mb alone!

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the info. It's just that I'm trying to figure out what kinds of plans to offer (I'm going to choose a provider where I can divide up the disk space -- I don't like being locked into only a few choices). You are absolutely right -- in considering disk space, I realize that not only do I have the site itself, but I have email quota, ftp directory size, and SQL db size [if necessary].

So if what you said is the case, why do so many hosts (forgetting reseller for a second) offer around 2-3GB bandwith for their hosted sites? Why allot it if no one needs it? (or so few people need it).

And the plans also offer the average person 100-150 MB. And unless you are running some kind of download site, I can't see needing that kind of space....

My average customer does ~ 8gigs/mo - That's from personal experience... And the overage rate is a lot if you dont "plan ahead" a little bit.

Why pay $2.00/mo for 200mb/mo and $5/gig overage (like i've seen a lot) instead of $10 for 15gigs... Look at the price per gig... It's worth it.

I can get $3.00/GB to resell for $X, $2.75 for $X + more, $2.50/GB for way too much.

I don't like reseller plans where I have only 3-4 plans to offer. I think it's unprofessional if I REALLY can't customize for the user. On the other hand, I like the idea of pay per useage, but then I have to bank on the fact that people will underuse. I guess it's really about what kinds of sites you are hosting. The DavidW homepage is not going to generate traffic as would the "free flash demonstrations" website.

What would you recommend? Other than running my own server (which I can't do right now) [well, I could, but...] I have to pick either or. The company I have now is giving me the prices above, and their tech support is EXCELLENT.

I'm just worried from a business standpoint because without fixed plans, it's really hard to predict revenue and generate a budget.

I'm surprised there's not more stats on this subject -- since they seem to have internet stats on everything else!

Thanks for your insight!
W